Mole Poblano Goes Mainstream: Cosi's Sandwich Fail

Those of us who fervidly celebrate the joys of immigrant cooking and its eventual assimilation into the standard American diet―think tortilla chips and guacamole, beef stroganoff, wonton soup, and IKEA's bouncy Swedish meatballs―may still be occasionally dismayed at the way certain dishes enter our collective gastronomic vernacular. One such discouraging example is Cosi Sandwich Bar's new chicken mole sandwich.

Feta cheese in a Mexican sandwich?

"Mole" or "mole poblano" are the accepted names for a 19th-century Mexican sauce that
originated in the city of Puebla, supposedly invented by nuns. But new as it may be in
Aztec years, mole poblano is very much in the style of ancient, Pre-Columbian moles,
containing multiple dried chiles sometimes still ground in a metate, native desert herbs
of alarming pungency, nuts, and a touch of chocolate, adding sweetness and bitterness
simultaneously to one of the grandest sauces in North America. (The sweetness comes
from the form in which the chocolate is often used: ground-up hot-cocoa discs, which
also contain raw sugar and pulverized nuts.)

Gringas and gringos have been enjoying this sauce in American urban areas for many
decades, and it has also assimilated with Tex-Mex, too, probably because the sauce has
long since become a countrywide Mexican staple. Even more recently, New Yorkers
have had easy access to mole tamales from vending trucks and the occasional female
entrepreneur who surreptitiously sells them from a shopping cart. And you can get mole
enchiladas at dozens of places in all five boroughs.

Yes, mole was destined to a hit here. Who doesn't love chocolate, and this savory usage
is nearly unique.

On not-very-interesting flatbread something like tree bark, Cosi's chicken mole sandwich
oozes avocado, pulled chicken, black beans, cilantro, kernels of bright yellow corn,
and--very odd man out--feta cheese. The sandwich is really not bad, but the red sauce
on the chicken (described as "adobo"), is far from being any kind of mole, let alone the
richly textured and midnight brown mole poblano. The sauce on Cosi's sandwich serves
as mere lubricant, and it falsely appropriates the name of something much, much better.

This is what real mole looks like (note the deep color), from the Upper East Side's Lupita's.